Nightwalker

by Ime Atakpa

  I see clouded faces and hear distorted voices, and though I’ve not the faintest idea from where they originate, they seem to me equally comforting and distressing. For a brief moment, these false memories are all I have. They envelop me and urge me closer to the edge of the water. I obey, moving along the pier cautiously, marking the continued increases of force with which the waves assault its sides. Do they welcome or reject me? And could the world even conspire to exert such a conscious effort?

  Water laps at the edge with increasing ferocity, as though demanding I retreat from the pier. But I refuse its demand. Soon enough, I’m as far out as the walkway extends. I imagine my feet engulfed in the water.

  Complete darkness falls in the span of a few minutes. Moonlight decorates the water’s surface. Little lights appear one by one in the night sky, and I let them draw away my frustration. The waves cease their eager rapping; the pier falls into peace. Just as I’m lulled into security by the nighttime’s quietude, something sinister replaces the waves. It comes without warning and lowers itself onto my shoulders.

  “Stop,” I tell my formless attacker. It puts little stock in my words, continuing its assault undeterred. Despair finds its way into me, a terrible and unshakable weight. Beneath this pressure, I’m immobilized; and now the waves gather themselves once more to crash against the sides of the pier.

  “I don’t want to.” The words come to me though I’m unsure from where. “Not again. Please.” Then something stabs at me, pushes me forward, and I’m greeted by the waves’ calm bob on the slant of the pier.

  Just let it go, I hear from an indistinguishable, garbled voice. No sooner is it heard than forgotten. And I’m observing the water, leaning forward. Each gentle shimmer, each micro-crest on the larger waves, and the myriad lunar reflections, and then the dark surrounding them. Beneath the shimmering surface is blackness and the great weight of all that remains above. That crushing weight.

  “No.” Only now do I catch myself and pull away. The weight lifts. I cannot stay here. And once I leave, I cannot return.

  I make my way back to the safety of the beach. Relief rushes over me to be away from the temptations of the waves. Unfortunately, I depart with yet another mystery. The mysterious force which bound me there and tempted me to the edge…perhaps better forgotten. When I think of how Mother would react to discover the ocean took both her sister and her son, I promise myself to remain ever-distant from the water, and keep my mind far from those temptations.

  In the darkness, I stumble through the branch-strewn sand toward the forest entrance and take the path home. Few thoughts enter my mind during this return voyage, though the events at the pier grate against the edge of my mind. At the moment, contemplating anything at all seems pointless. So far, inquisitiveness delivered no answers to me, only more questions in their stead.

  I return to the road by the same dirt path I left it on. Both my parents’ cars are parked in the driveway. Having no precise indication of the time makes an exact replication of my homecoming circumstances difficult, but if my absence from home in any way diluted my presence, returning should spike that presence and, with luck, alert them that I’ve returned. I pray that they’re receptive to the change in atmosphere.

  I slog once more up the steps of my house. But I halt on the last step. Something comes over me again, something foreboding, and I dare not challenge it. Razor claws steal into me, pull me backward away from the door.

  Pain. Unimaginable pain wrenches me forward, to the side, backward again; it grapples me in every direction simultaneously, stretching me thin. The door sits just ahead, and answers lie just beyond it.

  I feel the gale encroaching on me. Never before now have I wondered how it might feel to be outside during the storm, but now I’ve received an answer to the one question I never asked.

  Thunder cracks behind me.

  The gale cuts deeper into me, pulls me closer into its body. I struggle against it, willing myself from its clutches, but the best of my endeavors lead me nowhere. Its grip cannot be escaped. Doom looms ever-present. I hear the howls again, screeching their mantra.

  “Come back.”

  A vicious wind tears through the nighttime. It is the hand of rapture come to take me asunder. I feel the agony of my own circumstance, and feel the same agony in those words.

  “Come back.”

  Thunder crackles in my ear and the wind reaches to wrap itself around me. I remember the clear skies not long ago, how not a single cloud obscured the stars. I feel at peace for the moment that the wind comes closest. It grazes me like the fingers of a lover, soft and reassuring.

  “Come,” the wind screams. “Come with us.” It moves forward in a jerky billow and wraps itself around me. I’m hauled back from the front door. Then I feel it for what it is. Mother and Father wait for me to return, unaware that there is no returning from the place I’m in. It might be best that I, too, accept the futility of finding a way back to them. But buried in my fear and loathing, there’s a voice that fears to return to where the wind calls me to. It sounds off indistinctly in my ears like a distant echo. An echo suffices.

  I lunge forward, but the storm reels me in and thunders once more. Pain rips through me. I contemplate the great shame of my demise: that my parents would then be correct to mourn me. Not today. I do not welcome death. But it neither asks for nor requires my permission. It exists only to steal life, to reign over its harvest. Would that I could scream for assistance—death be damned, just beyond the door—to my parents, let them know the fate their lost son is soon to meet. Only then might I submit willingly to the rage of this storm. Arms of rushing air dance their deadly dance around me, engulf and squeeze me.

  Would that I could scream…

  Stringy, black threads run from my body, reach toward the front door. Even as the gale wrenches my body into itself, those aberrations propel themselves forward unto the door.

  Then a voice beckons.

  “Hubert!”

  Light overwhelms my senses. The hands of death hold me tightly in their grasp, continuing to tear me apart. A figure appears in the center of the light.

  “Hubert!”

  The light spreads outward, encompassing all around it; the figure within grows sharper. It ebbs and flows, sending its grasp outward, welcoming me toward its light. Suddenly, the storm wavers. I’m suspended in a pillar of light as the screeching winds die down, replaced by a sharp sizzle. The storm’s grip loosens. My body lurches forward, toward the voice. Mid lunge, a final beat of thunder booms behind me. It sounds tired, submissive, and the worst of it dissipates as the light grows stronger still and my body falls fully into its embrace.

  I’m oriented oddly. Turned around, facing forward, upside down…it’s all uncertain and hazy. The light distills, fades away into blackness, then flashes itself back on, though it’s duller now. The figure continues to stand in its midst and I, wholly unaware of my relation to the world around me, reach out as best I can to meet that figure in its cradle of light. That’s when I feel the warmth run into me. But now the figure begins to fade in and out. It flickers rapidly in the budding moments of its evanescence until the flickers slow to every so often, then not often at all. Then it ceases completely, and everything else ceases in turn.

  -VII-

  Law Unturned

  I wake to a grave sense, suspended amidst a flurry of rage and immediately aware that I am its center. Another awakening, different from any other yet incapable of administering to me the cure I sought. Answers rage around me, carried upon words at war.

  “I swear it! I swear I can’t have imagined it.” Mother’s voice, thinly veiled in serenity, slices through the atmosphere, through Father.

  “I know you need him to be here.” Father does as best as the circumstances allow to subvert the rising tension in his voice, to shelter Mother from the frustration accumulating within him since the start of it all.

  “I don’t need him. He’s here. I have him.”

  “Lyn, you
imag—”

  “Don’t say it again! Don’t. Don’t. Just—please.”

  “Lyn.”

  “I heard his voice. I swear it. As clear as I possibly could. How could I mistake that?”

  “You—”

  “How could I mistake my son’s voice?”

  They end there, granting me pause to mull over the turn of events. By any indication, it would seem that my experiment produced precisely the results I had hoped for. Freedom looms ever closer; certain escape no longer lingers at the edge of time. I’ve culled it from its slumber there, tempted it to seek me out in my wretchedness. She heard me. Given this information, I understand somewhat how the night before unfolded, how that light-bathed silhouette extending its arm was not an emissary of the death that gripped me, but an angel’s hand to deliver me from that fate. It was my mother’s.

  Father sighs deeply into a shaky palm, then lowers his hand slowly from his mouth, halfway to his chin. “I don’t want you to be disappointed if—”

  Mother throws her hands up. “See, you’re not listening.”

  “I am, it’s just I—” His hand moves from his chin to his forehead where the fingers split apart to slide through his peppery hair. “Look, I don’t want you to be disappointed. Or any sadder than you’ve been since, well, since it happened. I want us to be…you know?”

  Mother nods slightly.

  “You know?”

  “Yes. Yeah, I get it.” Her infectious energy sizzles out. The two regard each other coldly, and Mother returns to accepting the permanence of my erasure. However, a flicker of a flame emerges from the ashes of their discussion. Though its resolution leaves them equally perturbed and disheartened, I rejoice at the emergence of this prospect. An inkling of hope sprouts from Mother’s testimony, setting alight a new trail for me to follow.

  All evidence points to my inability to reach them conventionally. Only at the moment of my return did the veil of invisibility shatter. I cannot be seen or heard or touched except in particular circumstances. It lends stock to the notion that they adjust to my presence here and consequently lose their edge for sensing me. All that remains is the question of how I might reliably trigger a reaction. Sure enough, I could leave and return enough times to solidify my only lead but following last night’s events, my enthusiasm for leaving home has noticeably diminished.

  And so that trail goes cold.

  Hours later, I feel phantom waves lap against me and hear the voice of the waves calling me over the edge of the pier. I feel the wind spiraling around me, its many voices a cold comfort. And I cannot help but to fear the outdoors, where unwavering forces conspire to pull me further away from…

  My parents sit there still, dull and quiet. They’re both lost in the sadness, consumed by ignorance. I won’t be stripped away from them. Not until I’ve escaped this invisible hell.

  But how?

  I return to the privacy of my room. My thoughts run rampant. The pier’s beauty and horror coalesce, and each time I pass in front of the empty mirror, the nothing stares back at me. A taunt. And then the voices echo again. “Come back.” Come back where? What does it know? But as soon as I remember the terrible force of that wind, I shut away that curiosity.

  I pull away from the mirror and turn the corner of my bed beside which the small square table sits adjacent. My black lamp wobbles subtly atop it. Behind the cloth curtain—an improvised lampshade—a black bulb sits in its socket. And that socket is the tip of the lamp’s single leg. And that short, thick leg screws into a hefty, square foot that never wobbles. But today, that foot wobbles.

  As a child, I relied upon this lamp to provide peace throughout the long night. The cloth lampshade hangs over it like a ghostly paling. It drifts to and fro with each bob of the base. I remember when sunsets brought me terror, when the advent of my night walks still struck violent chords in my heart, and when Father built that lamp as a testament to the coldness of my reality. With his own two hands, he carved out the dense, wooden base. He drilled a small hole in its center for the piping that served as the leg. He wired the battery over days of hard labor, and when the lamp finally clicked to life, he smiled at me, for he had stepped up to a plate that none other except my mother could. He’d taken a piece of my discontent and shattered it in the wake of his creation.

  Light cannot disperse inherent darkness.

  Below that ghostly cloth, the lightbulb awaits the press of a button to charge it with energy. At that moment, it will snap to life and struggle to penetrate the black paint. What little light manages this task must then pass through the black cloth. Father refused to install a proper nightlight, and so I suffered many nights with no comforts, except the superficial knowledge that the lamp, too, was built to be cursed and forced to endure that curse until the day it could function no more. The bulb’s light struggled through layer after layer of darkness, and only a fragment escaped. Enough to stave off my fear of what the night brought but not enough to earn it the right to be called a lamp proper. Father built it to a fault and relished in its disability. “You’ll have an end to yours though,” were his words, clear as day in my mind though until now I’d forgotten them. The night he’d pieced together the last parts, he spoke the truth plain as it ever could be. I cannot escape from what’s inside of me, written in my blood. I may rage against fate, but to change it would be a fool’s errand. Father explained this just before he cast the cloth over the lamp and pressed the button at its base.

  I’ll only be wasting energy.

  Am I wasting it now?

  I saw the black lamp operate for the first time, amazed at the tenacity of the machine to strive toward escape. So little light escaped that it may very well not have ever been on. Nonetheless, during the earliest years of my night walks, I made certain to always keep that light shining. I clung to the dim hope that by some miracle, my blood curse would end with me or that some secret remained to be discovered which might endow my ultimate salvation. Through hopes and disappointments, that light always shone with me, always reminded me that I could not escape my destiny. Not then, or ever.

  But now. What of now? How should I suffer this new affliction, so foreign to both myself and my parents except with reinvigorated spirits? No evidence confirms the futility of my escape from this, and so hope perseveres. I cannot surrender.

  Yes. She heard my voice.

  Doubts will fester, and I must accept them. With the very doubts that seek to undermine my success, I’ll fuel my efforts against them. I rebel against fate’s design.

  I retread my steps, return to the mirror. Nothing in this world occurs without evidence. All acts leave traces of their occurrence. My disease is unnatural but a disease nonetheless, and thus it must manifest symptoms and those symptoms must connect in some regard to a solution. Where and how the symptoms manifest themselves, those are the questions I seek to answer. The mirror laughs at me, reproduces the empty room as it always does, and mocks my inability to divine an answer.

  Think harder, Hubert. Think harder. Focus and think. Think.

  Then I calm myself. If I’m to find my answers, I cannot be clouded by frustration. Thus, I tune everything out, even my own thoughts. I let the world continue around me sift slowly through my experience for clues. My spirit lightens. It floats upon the air as though suspended from string. I feel at peace with the clarity this meditation brings. And so I let it carry me.

  I come to feeling groggy. It immediately dawns on me that the world has changed from a moment before. Then another thought: a sharp, blinding light flashes in my mind’s eye, scarring me with heat and wind and water. A creeping fear takes my mind in its grasp, returning me to that moment of peril. But then I remember: the moment is passed. I awoke from that tragedy alive though not well, still invisible to my parents. They sat on the couch discussing their present discontent, and I left them there to conduct myself to better ends. I came here, to my room, and gazed into the mirror. And after that—I turn around—I reminisced. The lamp still wobbles gently
on the table, nearly indistinguishable from the darkness around it. Then it clicks.

  My consciousness slipped. Waking now, it feels no different than a night walk, but it couldn’t have been that. Whether or not I’m connected to the visible world, the rules of the walk would remain intact. Thus, I’d not have awakened in the same place I lost myself. Something else happened. Though it’d been midday, the stars now draw out from beneath the curtain of sunlight.

  When I consider it again, the light at the end of my journey yesterday feels like a far-off memory. Intuition, however, disagrees. My temporal awareness lapses between accurate and unreliable. What happened in these forgotten hours?

  I might be bothered by the oddness of it all, if not for the regular absurdity of my life. A blood curse, a crucible of invisibility, and now a detachment from time. These pieces must fit together somehow. I consider that my initial plan had been to meditate my way to a solution. Between then at midday and now at sunset, I’ve not made measurable progress. So then to what endeavor does that time belong? I study the room intently, discovering not a single object out of place. With that investigation swiftly concluded, I return full circle to my ignorance.

  But this is not the first time I’ve experienced such a phenomenon. During my journey to the forest, did I not experience a similar lapse of time? And on the first day of my return, was I not perplexed to see how quickly day turned to night? These time lapses, so like sleep, have been nothing like it. During my trek to the pier, did I not already consider how abstract the wheel of time now turns? Yet cognition only now allows those disparate fragments a chance at connecting. Strange and subtle forces act upon me in choice moments—not dissimilar to the moments preceding sleep—that alert me it’s time. Only then it begins.

  My mind clears and focus diverts inwards toward a singular goal. It’s Thursday. The image of a calendar pinned in my parents’ room creeps into my consciousness. A border of gold encases the plain squares within. Black numbers cast in bold type rise embossed from the parchment. Little pencil scribblings set forth reminders. Energy. Phone. I scan for today on that calendar, for Thursday the twenty-fourth. Once it’s squarely pinned in my mind, I hone in on it. Slightly to the right, my objective stares back at me, a black twenty-five, circled on that calendar. Scribbled in and circled in pencil: pay day.